A celebration of Texas culture through music and photography will come to Capital Community College on Thursday March 10th as part of CCC’s free public music series.

Apollo Chamber Player To Perform “Texas Roots”.

Apollo Chamber Players  will present Texas Roots. The program features the fifth work of Apollo’s multi-year commissioning project, 20×2020, a string quartet based on Texas folk and indigenous music by El Paso native Arthur Hernandez, composer and Capital’s music professor and coordinator of the college’s Music Industry degree program.

Photographer Chuy Benitez

The work will be presented alongside photographic images by award-winning photographer Chuy Benitez.

The concert also showcases music by Julia Smith, a Juilliard-educated 20th century composer born and raised in Texas. Her work to be presented, Quartet for Strings, evokes jazz and folk music elements within a distinctive Texas soundscape. Illustrating the important influence of Texas’ Czech heritage, Bedřich Smetana’s String Quartet No. 1, From My Life, will conclude the program.

Music Professor Arthur Hernandez

“Texas Roots offers a multicultural, multisensory concert experience. Composer Arthur Hernandez and photographer Chuy Benitez offer a creative artistic lens with which to appreciate Texas’ wonderfully unique cultural tableau,” explains Artistic Director Matthew Detrick.

Mr. Hernandez shares: “Texas is a phenomenon like no other. No state in our union quite rivals the history, indigenous cultural diversity, and larger-than-life  stature of Texas. Writing this work was a transformative experience for me. Having been an expatriate of Texas for half of my life, this project allowed me to reconnect with my native state and to learn even more about her than I had ever known.”

The March 10th performance begins at 6 p.m. at Centinel Hill Hall auditorium on the 11th floor of Capital Community College  in downtown Hartford. Concerts @ Capital are free and open to the public and are supported, in part, by the Capital Community College  Foundation.